Down the Amazon

The 900-pound gorilla in the publishing room is Amazon. Founded in 1994 this purely Internet based retail company now accounts for two-thirds of all the books sold in the U.S., (along with a staggering array of other merchandise). With such dominance Amazon can generally dictate terms on book prices and sales percentages to the book publishers. So far, royalties to writers is still fairly generous as these things go, but with such power, things could easily change in the future. For anyone starting out as a writer and self-publisher, Amazon has made it somewhat easy for a person to get his or her book online. They have downloadable programs that will convert a book to their Kindle platform programing format, (myob). Once converted it is fairly simple to create a book page, sign your contractual agreement and make your book available. Their KDP, (Kindle Direct Publishing), program promises to help make your book available to a wide audience. But that is up to you. Once online you can create a dedicated author page to talk about yourself as a writer and promote current and future books. If you are short of money needed to publish paperback copies of your book, Amazon’s print on demand company, CreateSpace, will publish a print edition of your e-book to sell online and there is no upfront charge. There are also many tools that they offer for you to be able to build that hard copy of your work. Amazon can also turn your book into an audiobook version of your work. There are forums to help connect with your fellow self publishers and other options to help merchandise your book. Since a lot of readers buy their books based on recommendations and reviews, once you have 20 to 25 reviews of your book, Amazon includes it in the “also bought” and “you might like” lists, helping boost the visibility of your book. After 50 to 70 reviews, Amazon will highlight the book for a spotlight position and list it in its newsletter. Of course, any other outside promotion will help in the sales of your book as well.

I am not actively promoting Amazon as the way to go in self publishing, I am merely pointing out that it could be a good place to start for the perpetually clueless like me who, (at my age), does not have the time or energy to laboriously find a real book publisher that will do all of this for me. The publishers tend to stick with their A-list authors that they know will actually make money for them. It is almost impossible for any starting writer to get picked up by a major publishing company right away, even if they were an amazingly gifted writer, (which I am most definitely not). The rest of us have to promote our work any way we can and attend writers and book fairs when there are any in our area, (below, my friend and co-author Ron Thornburg and I try to sell our trails book at a local book and authors fair). It is often a long and difficult process, but one at which you can go at your own pace and on your own time.